A switch is a network device configured to forward an electrical signal. The switch can provide a dedicated electrical signal channel for any two network nodes accessing the switch.
A chassis-shaped switch is mainly applied to a backbone layer of a network, and has obtained more attention in recent years. The chassis-shaped switch includes a main control board and a service board, where the service board has many slots for inserting a network interface card. The chassis-shaped switch is usually set to be a high redundancy system, is configured with an active main control board and a standby main control board, and can still provide an available and reliable network service when an uncontrollable disaster or a fault occurs.
Generally, a central processing unit (CPU) on the active main control board in the chassis-shaped switch and a CPU on the standby main control board are separately connected to a CPU on the service board by using a control bus. A switching chip on the active main control board and a switching chip on the standby main control board are separately connected to a physical layer (PHY) component on the service board by using a data bus, and provide interconnection and data exchange between service boards, where the data bus usually is a point-to-point bus. Because control information exchange between the main control board and the service board is implemented by using an independent control bus, an independent CPU and management software need to be configured for the service board. In addition, limited by the data bus, a Gigabit Ethernet (GE) interface cannot be flexibly configured as multiple 100M Ethernet interfaces. To achieve flexible configuration, a switching chip needs to be added inside the main control board, which increases hardware costs and software complexity of the chassis-shaped switch.